Gurukulam: Teaching Oneness in Southern India

Swami Dyananda Saraswati is exactly the sort of spiritual teacher most seekers hope to study under. He is witty, charismatic, and decidedly beyond worldly concerns. Yet, he functions in our terrestrial realm with quite a high level of competency. It is easy to understand why his Arsha Vidya Gurukulam ashram draws students from around the world for its celebrated five-week course—and he is a major reason why they keep coming back. They might not necessarily attain enlightenment, because that is the sort of thing you never find when you look for it. Nevertheless, the Swami’s diverse students will find some degree of illumination through his words in Jillian Elizabeth & Neil Dalal’s Gurukulam (trailer here), which fittingly screens this weekend at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea.

Advaita Vedanta is the oldest school of Vedanta, the Hinduist philosophical tradition to which J.D. Salinger subscribed to sometime after the publication of Catcher in the Rye. Frankly, Salinger was far more of a hermit or Stylite than the Swami ever was. Despite renouncing the world, he is quite sociable and gregarious. Clearly, enlightenment will not begrudge a little friendly conversation.

For obvious reasons, those most interest in Vedic and Hindu religious thought will get considerably more out the documentary than comparatively casual viewers. However, it is still rather intriguing as a work of non-fiction filmmaking. At various points, Elizabeth and Dalal essentially present the audience with a choice. They can either join in Swami Dyananda’s meditation and visualization exercises, or they can remain spectators. They are both valid choices, but you have to choose.

Of course, much of Gurukulam is devoted to quiet observation, but it is never as hushed as Into Great Silence (a not terrible comparative film). There is always plenty of life going on at the Arsha Vidya. In fact, even to shallow agnostics, it looks quite livable for an ashram nestled in the rainforests of southern India.

Indeed, this is an unusually transporting film, submerging viewers in the sights and ambient sounds of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam and its surrounding environs. Serving as cinematographer, documentarian J.P. Sniadecki (whose are films are screening throughout Manhattan this week) has a keen eye both for the big, symbolically loaded Samsara-esque shots, as well as the smaller, lighter moments of bonhomie.

Gurukulam will probably not inspire scores of new Vedic adherents to flock to the Swami’s ashram, but that means all of us unabashed materialists can feel safe watching it. It will definitely take you someplace you have never been before. Once there, Elizabeth, Dalal, and editor Mary Lampson show a shrewd editorial judgment focusing on telling details. It is a finely crafted film under any circumstances, but there will be no better venue to see it amongst a knowledgeable and sympathetic audience than the Rubin Museum. Recommended for those who enjoy meditative and immersive documentaries, Gurukulam screens this Saturday (8/22), Sunday (8/23), and Monday (8/24) at the Rubin Museum of Art.

Cinema on the Edge: People’s Park

You have to dig Cinema on the Edge co-organizer J.P. Sniadecki’s style. Fluent in Mandarin, the American ethnographic documentarian quickly became a regular patron and guest of underground Chinese film festivals, as well as the even less formal film clubs (such as the one he presents his documentary Yumen for in Yijun He’s short doc, When You Can’t See the Film). His films seem to get steadily better and better, which bodes well for his next project, considering his latest film Iron Ministry was just terrific.

However, Patrons of Cinema on the Edge should somewhat temper their expectations for People’s Park, which he co-directed with Libbie Cohn, predating both Ministry and Yumen. It is definitely more of a formal filmmaking exercise than a statement of truth to power. Yet, it too was caught up in the Beijing Independent’s difficult history, when its 2012 screening was forced to move to the festival’s offices by a not-so mysterious power outage at the official venue. Fortunately, that sort of thing will not happen when People’s Park screens this Thursday at New York’s Asia Society, as part of Cinema on the Edge.

For seventy-eight minutes, Sniadeckie & Cohn will give viewers a continuous, unedited tracking shot tour of People’s Park in Chengdu, the capitol of Sichuan. They will capture plenty of life happening, but by its very nature, Sniadeckie & Cohn will not have the opportunity to make editorial judgements later. While the shoot was carefully planned, they were still trusting to providence to deliver interesting people into their field of vision. Sometime fate provides, sometimes it does not. Yet, what makes Iron Ministry so great are all the small but telling conversations and poignantly little moments Sniadeckie captures. That simply is not possible for Park, because it is so locked-into its preset course.

Nevertheless, viewers who are open to Park will still get something back from it, starting with the film’s distinctive rhythm. It is also fascinating to see how the various park visitors respond to Sniadeckie & Cohn’s camera. Some will clearly perform for it, while others are openly wary. After all, there is good cause for surveillance paranoia in the PRC, even more than in post-Snowden America.  Even so, Park does not have the same broad cross-section found in Ministry, because everyone who wanders into their frame has sufficient leisure time on a Saturday afternoon to be there.

People’s Park is certainly an accomplishment in street-level filmmaking all film students should have an opportunity to see. Still, for many it would be better appreciated as an installation one could duck in and out of than as a film to consume in one sitting. Regardless, that is how it was conceived and is usually presented, notwithstanding suspicious power failures. Recommended for patrons of experimental, non-narrative documentaries, People’s Park screens this Thursday (8/20) at the New York Asia Society, as part of Cinema on the Edge. Highly recommended for wider documentary and Chinese cinema audiences, Sniadeckie’s Iron Ministry also starts a week-long run this Friday (8/21) at MoMA.

NYFF ’14: The Iron Ministry

Anyone who still held to the illusion the People’s Republic of China was a classless society will stand corrected by the extreme economic stratification of the nation's rail travel. There is a very definite class hierarchy and the respective accommodations vary accordingly. The train is kind of-sort of a metaphor, but it is also a rather cinematic setting for J.P. Sniadecki’s observational documentary The Iron Ministry (clip here), which screens during the 52^nd New York Film Festival.

In many ways, Ministry functions as a perfect companion film to Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home, but it is not nearly as depressing. Granted, there are literal throngs of people crammed into the lowest class compartments, many of whom are likely facing some pretty grim circumstances. The conductors also uniformly seem to be officious jerks. However, there is a whole lot of life going on throughout the trains Sniadecki filmed.

In fact, some of the most fun seems to be going on where the lower middle class meets the upper rabble. For a fly-on-the-wall ethnographic film, Iron is surprisingly funny, especially the devilish kid cracking morbid jokes about the government’s population control policies. If he is the future, the Party is in trouble.

Frankly, it is hard to say whether the film inspires optimism or not. In one scene, an informal group of passengers start to criticize the corruption and control of the Communist government only to somewhat walk it back shortly later and then creep it forward a little. At least, Sniadecki captures a sense of the country’s cultural and religious diversity, broadening viewers’ perspective in small but telling ways.

Filmed on a fleet of trains over a three year period, Iron is an immersive sensory experience, but in this case that is not code for dull and depressing. It is a rather sly film that earns kudos for its correct Queen’s English usage of the word “inflammable” in the subtitles. The Mandarin speaking Sniadecki also deserves credit for getting bounced out of the upper class carriages. Livelier than you would expect, The Iron Ministry is recommended for anyone who wants to experience a slightly claustrophobic transcontinental Chinese rail journey from the comfort of the Upper Westside when it screens this Sunday (10/5) at the Gilman, as part of this year’s NYFF.

Chinese Realities: Yumen

That hardly took long.  An oil boomtown in the 1990’s, Yumen is now a deserted ghost town—literally so if you believe some of the stories told by stragglers.  Regardless, viewers certainly get a vivid sense of contemporary China’s “burn rate” in Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao & J.P. Sniadecki’s Yumen (trailer here), which has its North American premiere tomorrow during MoMA’s ongoing Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

According to one disembodied voice-over, the abandoned hospital is and was haunted by the spirit of an infant.  She once saw it with some friends, one of whom still bears a scar from the encounter.  Another man also remembers the hospital, having frequently visited an ambiguously sickly woman there.  These remnants of Yumen’s glory days are like ghosts themselves, often filmed like ant-like specks shuffling through the surreal post-industrial landscape.

The directorial trio consistently plays games with the doc format, incorporating what sound like staged reminiscences and showing the seams in between their 16mm reel changes.  Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the reality of the northwest Gansu town.  It is impossible to recreate ruins of such scale on an indie budget.  It looks like Pripyat outside of Chernobyl, just without the background radiation (as far as we know).

For what it’s worth, the woman’s ghost story is kind of creepy.  Yet more to the point, the intertwining memories and images clearly illustrate the pain and dislocation resulting from the death of a community, even one not especially beloved by its residents, such as Yumen.

Yumen is an impressive looking film, but even at its sixty-five minute running time, it feels a smidge stretched.  Certain visuals start to repeat themselves and a late scene rather overindulges in globalist irony, as one of their POV figures strolls through a nearby open air market singing along to Springsteen’s “My Hometown.”  As a multi-millionaire and self-appointed spokesman of the proletariat, Springsteen might actually be the perfect voice for today’s China, but the sequence just feels too long and stagey.

If you want to get a good look at Yumen this film is probably your best option, because the government is not like to sponsor tours there anytime soon.  It is not for everyone, but it should fascinate those with a taste for more experimental documentaries in the spirit of Disorder and San Yuan Li.  Recommended for aesthetically adventurous China watchers, Yumen screens this Monday (5/20) at MoMA, presented in-person by Sniadecki, the former American expatriate filmmaker, whose previous credits include Chaiqian and Sognhua, two similarly naturalistic observations of Chinese daily life.